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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26551483">Hearthfire, Heartsfire</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Umbralpilot/pseuds/Umbralpilot'>Umbralpilot</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Original Work</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>5+1 Things, Bedside Vigils, Caretaking, Concussions, Facial Shaving, Feelings Realization, Hand Jobs, Hurt/Comfort, Internalized Homophobia, Love Confessions, Loyalty, M/M, Pining, Revolutionaries, Self-Acceptance, Serious Injuries, Sleep Deprivation</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 08:21:21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>18,036</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26551483</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Umbralpilot/pseuds/Umbralpilot</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>A bright fire can change a life, a nation. But even the brightest fire is stronger with a hearth to burn within.</p><p>Five + one times Ander Kirschen, nobleman with a painful secret, took care of Festus Detrich, firebrand of the revolution, and how they both changed along the way.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Original Male Character/Original Male Character</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Iddy Iddy Bang Bang!, Iddy Iddy Bang Bang! 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This is a <a href="https://guardiansverse.dreamwidth.org/">Guardiansverse</a> story, though no previous knowledge is needed! You might want to read <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/22869823">But Not Broken</a> first to understand the immediate context, but that one's very short.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Being a mutineer on the run with one’s soldiers was not nearly so romantic as it might have sounded.</p><p>Some men – younger men, the proper revolutionary sort – might have found this an upsetting surprise. Ander did not. For all that the urge, the impulse behind his turning his gun on the brigadier must have been a kind of madness, he had done it with no particular delusions. The practicalities of mutiny were stark. First he had stood the rank and file for a long while with their eyes shut, letting any man who wished to leave to do without shame. Then he had pored over his maps, catalogued his resources, split up the men and goods. Sent them off on separate paths to the same goal. All with orders to defend themselves without hesitation and with extreme prejudice. It was too late for anything else.</p><p>Not even Ander, General Kirschen, Freiherr of Estgardt, could escape the match he had set to the powder keg of his stirring country. And worse: the common soldiers might mercifully be shot, but the officers would be strung up and flogged to death. Just as the brigadier had tried to do to the man who had put this madness into Ander’s heart.</p><p>He had had very little time to as speak with that first mutineer. Festus Detrich. The name was utterly common. The brigadier had provided Ander with only the scarcest of facts about the captive he’d meant to butcher before Ander’s men: Detrich had been a cavalry officer, well decorated, but low in rank even after ten years’ service. A peasant risen to some fortune, until achievements could no longer compensate for blood. Caught after killing his superior and hiding out for a month in a remote village where the act attracted a motley rabble of followers. None of it was remarkable. Any man of political astuteness, or world-weary experience, could have told that the army was ripe for rebellion from just such a man.</p><p>But it had not been any man: it had been Detrich. Detrich who had told Ander’s men, <em>They hold the whip, but we hold the guns</em>. And Ander’s men had listened.</p><p>Ander had listened.</p><p>It was their third day on the march, and this far northwest the nights were chill even in summer. They had gone deep enough into the shelter of the wild forest that Ander permitted his men a single campfire. For himself he stayed by it only long enough to heat up some water, then went aside to wash his face, neaten his hair, and shave. His men followed a commander they thought immovable. Cold steel did not become dishevelled.</p><p>His men followed a commander who was utterly reliable, measured in all speech and action, one who had time and again proven that he was daring only because he had more than sufficient skill to back up his courage. An aloof and exacting leader, likelier to inspire trust than love – but trust he inspired in spades. They did not know what this mix of caution and accomplishment shielded him from. They knew only that he had never taken a step he had not thought through and through.</p><p>In the murk of the woods, it was hard to see his own face in his little mirror. He frowned at the dark reflection. How many men had he seen in chains? How many punished, bled for the Kaiser’s justice? How many other mutineers, even – until Detrich?</p><p>What had it been in Detrich’s chains that had made them seem breakable?</p><p>He splashed a last cupped handful of water on his face, packed up his wash kit, and went to see the one mutineer who had won freedom.</p><p>A little away from the others, Ander’s surgeon had just finished redressing Detrich’s wounded back by the light of his little lamp. They spoke together in low murmurs. Ander had for days been doubting whether the surgeon would stay with the group, but from the two men’s tones he seemed to have warmed to Detrich with remarkable speed. Surprising, and yet not. At the sight of Ander, the surgeon pulled up to his feet and saluted as he came forward.</p><p>“Sir.”</p><p>“How is he?”</p><p>“Healing cleanly, but I suspect in a great deal of pain. If we can set a slower pace – “</p><p>“We cannot.”</p><p>He expected a protest, knowing his man. But the surgeon only pursed his lips, then shrugged. “Ah, well. He said it was so himself.”</p><p>To that, Ander did not know how to respond. He glanced over the man’s shoulder at what he could make of Detrich in the dark: not much, just a glint off almost unnaturally dark blue eyes.</p><p>“I shall need some time,” he said to the surgeon. “Leave me the light.”</p><p>Lamp in hand, he could look over Detrich more closely as he came to kneel by the mutineer. Detrich did not look like a man in pain, or if he did it was not pain that one less experienced in the matter than Ander could have seen. His lacerated back was straight, his broad shoulders set, his eyes clear and hard and a gunmetal blue. Some men carried pain like stones about their necks; Detrich held his like red coals in his chest.</p><p>Just as he had when the brigadier’s whip had snapped for the first time, Ander thought: what a wretched world, in which such beauty could be so ravaged.</p><p>It was not a thought he could afford. Not before, as a nobleman and officer, and not now that he was a deserter – a mutineer himself – hunted – it was not a thought he could have when he had abandoned everything that had protected him all his life.</p><p>“General,” Detrich said.</p><p>Ander hesitated for a bare moment. He knew Detrich’s rank, but the mutineer could hardly claim it – except perhaps from another of the same position. “Rittmeister.”</p><p>Detrich’s eyes brightened a touch in honest gladness. It sent a wholly unexpected start through Ander, sharp and sweet.</p><p>He put the lamp down between them, where it cast the lines of Detrich’s face into strange shadows under the ink-stroke fall of his hair. “I am pleased to see you recovering.”</p><p>“After what you’ve done to save me? Dying would be graceless.”</p><p>“Death rarely cares for grace.”</p><p>“But I do,” Detrich said, too blunt to be joking.</p><p>He had a remarkable voice, Ander thought, to go with his remarkable face and form. A resonant bass that rang as though there was an open sky within the space of his body. It invited a plunge. Before he could answer, Detrich leaned a touch closer, spoke again: “We’d expected sooner or later some highborn officer would attach himself to the cause, but not like this. Not someone of your age and position, who hasn’t the connections to make it into a power play.”</p><p>“You have assessed my position?”</p><p>“And every other man’s above a certain rank.”</p><p>Ander eyed him. “You have been planning this mutiny of yours for a long time.”</p><p>“Longer than you imagine,” Detrich said, and in that, too, was frightfully sincere. </p><p>It was difficult, to look into those eyes when they were so focused. Ander fought the urge to swallow hard. “I must wonder why you suppose I did it, then.”</p><p>Now it was Detrich’s turn to look him over, with a touch of something close enough to uncertainty that for a moment Ander thought to catch a tantalizing glimpse of what lay behind the spell. Then he realized: not uncertainty, no. It was expectation.</p><p>“I wondered, too,” the mutineer said. “I know your reputation, General, and the whispers that come with it don’t matter to me. You have led an exemplary life. Duty. Service. All things exactly right. That’s easy, of course, with a start as good as yours. I doubt my comrades would be impressed with you. A man who has everything rarely comprehends what it truly means to burn it all away in a moment.”</p><p><em>More than you imagine</em>. Ander did not say it. He knew exactly what sort of whispers Detrich had heard; had lived the length of his adult life striving to ensure such dismissal as Detrich was granting him out of hand. <em>An exemplary life</em>.</p><p>It was all gone now. Only the gallows remained, if one was lucky, and the pillory, the whipping post, the iron brand if one was not – but there was Detrich’s voice, drawing him in as the mutineer spoke on, “But I believe a man can come to see – even in a moment – that everything he has is the poison fruit of rotten roots. That the bricks of his house were fired in injustice, and the mortar is others’ blood. And that he cannot continue this pretence that all is right, when all is <em>wrong</em>.”</p><p>And there it was: within that expectation, an echo of ferocious joy, that which had  blazed across Detrich’s face when he had been freed. Ander could no longer stop himself swallowing, as though trying to lift a siege from his windpipe.</p><p>“You believe that I can…”</p><p>“Go free. Make right.”</p><p>“This world… rarely cares for right.”</p><p>“No,” Detrich said. “But I do.”</p><p>Only a few words. The paltriest counterpoint to the whole of Ander’s life. But he spoke them in the voice of a man for whom the world would change.</p><p><em>All is wrong</em>. The words tangled in the thorns about Ander’s mind and twisted there, as though clawing to break through the thicket. More than thirty years since he had known himself for what he was, and he had never dared to think even that much. Quite a lot of <em>I am wrong</em>, of course; and scenes enough of brutality, turned on men like him and at men like Detrich, to think himself well-versed in the nature of the world. He had built a shining tower of a life and all of it of lies, and he had never even dared to call it a pretence.</p><p>And yet; and yet. There was Detrich before him: beautiful, brutalized, but unbending. <em>Expectant</em>.</p><p>“I shall do my best to impress your comrades,” he said, only a touch rasping. And Detrich smiled.</p><p>“They’ll fall in line. I’m not building my revolution with fools.” That again: <em>my revolution</em>. Such temerity. Such peace of purpose. Ander was grateful when Detrich shifted back again, brows drawing tight with thought; he needed to catch his breath. ”We’re twenty-five miles south of the province capital by my reckoning. Is that right?”</p><p>“Twenty-six. I expect two more days on the road.”</p><p>“I’ve folk there who will shelter us.”</p><p>“We shall not need shelter for long. The garrison captain there had served under me some years ago. He is a brutish commander and a pedestrian tactician – we will gain access with little trouble and purchase with little more, so long as we arrive before a better man reinforces him. Once the rest of my men make their way here we shall have an ideal staging post for the province. But we cannot, I fear, travel any slower.”</p><p>“On my account? Don’t mind it. I’ve had worse pain for less reward. Finding you was worth every lash.” Something began to unlock in his shoulders, his eyes to drift shut. “Thank you, General.”</p><p>“You need not stand on my rank, Rittmeister.” Only when one corner of Detrich’s mouth curled up did the irony strike him. “… Detrich.”</p><p>The curl flashed into a full smile again, brief and brilliant. “Kirschen.”</p><p>It was minute, but Ander had experience enough to see it: the way joy, even brief, drained the edge of the rage that simmered all through Detrich’s muscles, and left room for weariness to creep in. He sat for some moments watching Detrich tip the balance this way and that. Breathing slowly in, wincing as it strained his dressings, raising a hand to rake back his hair only to frown as the movement strained at his back. While his eyes were open and pinning, the bruised shadows gave them an unnerving intensity. As soon as he shut those eyes and drew back he looked a week out of proper sleep at least.</p><p>These were concerns for the surgeon. And yet. Softly, Ander asked: “How bad is it, in truth?”</p><p>Detrich’s voice was clipped, “Bad.”</p><p>A beat, and he rallied, shoulders squaring again: “But it’s a small thing. Nothing to my last flogging.” Now the upward quirk of his mouth was all bitterness. It vanished behind one hand as he scrubbed a palm across his lower face, where days’ worth of unruly growth had almost overtaken a moustache and beard once neat as a painting. “This is what really drives me to distraction, if you must know. I hate – I feel filthy.”</p><p>“Have you not washed?”</p><p>“As I could, but that isn’t it. It’s a matter of appearances. A great deal is, when you’re the only peasant among your brother-officers.”</p><p>He looked at Ander sidelong, and abruptly Ander knew better than to say <em>I understand</em>. “I would gladly lend you my kit.”</p><p>“And I’ll gladly take it in a few days when my hands are steady. I’m told I’ve a good face for a popular revolution. For the people’s sake my nose must stay attached.”</p><p>Now at last it was real humour, and Ander did permit himself a smile, though he was deeply thankful to have long ago lost the habit of flushing.</p><p>He was a man of control; Ander was certain of that if of nothing else in his life that had unravelled so abruptly. But he knew also that anytime, even a few days, was too long to carry about such a feeling – of filth and shame and stinging awareness of others’ eyes. He said, “May I offer my assistance?”</p><p>Detrich’s eyes widened. “What?”</p><p><em>Kirschen, you old fool. </em>“Your pardon – I shall of course understand if you do not yet wish my razor anywhere near your throat.”</p><p>“No, I’m only surprised that you – I’m more used to highborn men who can barely shave themselves, much less another.”</p><p>“Another is easier, as it happens.” He said it dryly, but approving amusement shimmered in Detrich’s eyes. A bracing sight. “Your nose is quite safe.”</p><p>Detrich opened his mouth; hesitated; lingered; and finally said, “I – would appreciate it.”</p><p>That hesitation, sudden and open, was as remarkable as everything else about him. Ander was not in truth a fool, and old was true enough: he was entirely aware of the leap of his own fascination. It would have been better had Detrich declined.</p><p>Detrich had not. And so there Ander was again, committed to a course as surely as he had been with gun in hand.</p><p>He was a man of control. He gave a nod and quickly fetched his kit and some hot water. Detrich watched him work straight razor over strop, his eyes on Ander’s hands – not quite the same kind of intensity he had looking into Ander’s own eyes, but one with its own tangibility, nonetheless. Next Ander shaved off slivers of soap, stirred them into a good bubbling of foam in his cup. And then it was time to put his brush to Detrich’s face.</p><p>When he raised the brush Detrich at last shut his eyes. He leaned his head back, his mouth fell slightly open, nostrils flaring – relishing the smell of the soap, Ander realized, with a sudden and unexpected twinge of anger at the thought that Detrich could not have been afforded much cleanliness while in chains. Up close his features were revealed in their hard-cut elegance: a proud mouth, a high brow and strong, broad cheekbones. Across the right side of the jaw, the brigadier’s whip had left a shallow cut and a deep bruise. A muscle twitched faintly there when Ander’s brush passed over the damaged skin. Briefly he thought that might look rakish if it scarred, but a slice of pain ran through his lungs at the idea that the flogging would leave any lasting mark on Detrich at all.</p><p>Detrich’s breathing had deepened, slowed, though in an oddly deliberate fashion. One that spoke of restraint, of holding back – but not of fear. He did not flinch when Ander first touched the razor to his skin, only let out a long, low breath.</p><p>Relief, Ander realized; he was holding back a crushing relief.</p><p>The flow of his focus deepened as he slid the razor in slow strokes. Where the foam was swept away, the copper-brown of Detrich’s bared skin almost shone in the yellow lamplight. He responded readily to the lightest touch of Ander’s fingers tipping his face this way and that. His head remained tilted back, eyes closed and lips open – a look so very much like surrender.</p><p>It was only a shave, even if one much longed for. Such a common service – a farce, really, for a freiherr to give it to a peasant. Ander could have explained, if pressed, why he had drawn his gun on the brigadier, had given up everything in a moment. He could not explain why this, of all things, possessed him so completely.</p><p>With painstaking care he navigated the shape of that proud mouth, the tender place where the throat met the jaw. So close: the razor’s edge whispered up and down with Detrich’s breathing, close enough as to betray the hint of a rasp that recalled that single, clipped word: <em>bad</em>. Pain shadowed the set of Detrich’s shoulders, gathered in the tight corners of his eyes.  And yet even as the blade slid along the side of his windpipe, the tenderest spot, Ander could feel the brittle flow out of him with every brushing touch to the newly bared skin.   </p><p>The brushes were so obviously welcome. He permitted himself just a few more of them than strictly necessary, just to see how many of the minute frown lines he could clear from Detrich’s face.</p><p>The whole affair was brief, of course. Very soon he was giving his blade a final rinse, while Detrich wiped off the last specks of foam and ran curious fingers about his mouth and jaw, clearly not used to a bare face. Ander could see why: the shave had taken an unreasonable number of years off him. Revealed something gentle in the shape of his lips, that in turn eerily gentled those sea-blue eyes. Or then perhaps it was that he looked at Ander with such open, wondering gratitude.</p><p>“The only thing I expected less than a highborn general freeing me, was him giving me a shave.” There was a wry humour in the words, but Detrich’s voice wasn’t made for it. Its depth gave too much room for sincerity to echo.</p><p>Ander inclined his head. “An adequate one, I hope.”</p><p>“I feel a new man.”</p><p>“You do look improved. Though I beg you do not dismiss your injuries. I grasp, of course, the matter of appearances, but the men who are still with us are committed. And as for me –“</p><p>He almost faltered – uncharacteristic, disorienting, not an experience he had expected to have at fifty years of age, a commander and a veteran – but the words came to him, “Your low birth matters as little to me as the whispers behind my reputation do to you.”</p><p>Now it was Detrich who almost faltered, who blinked, the youth of his beardless face making the expression an achingly soft one.</p><p>Softly, too, he said, “Where have you been all these years?”</p><p>He was speaking to himself, Ander realized. Not a question for Ander to answer, perhaps not even to understand. But it took purchase in him like a seed set to sprout. <em>Where </em>have<em> I been?</em></p><p>“It was my pleasure to be of service,” he said instead, bowing his head once more. “I shall not keep you from your rest. If you feel able, tomorrow, we shall speak of our strategy as we march.”</p><p>Detrich looked at and into him for another moment, then nodded, gave a hint of a smile.</p><p>“Yes,” he said. “You and I, we’ll do great things together.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The bells in the keep were ringing for help in a frantic tune. But it was too late: the revolution had already been inside.</p><p>A brisk summer wind tore through Ander’s hair as the great gates opened before him. Really he ought to cut it – it was slipping bounds sternly set for many years – but there was a heady pleasure in the feeling. And little time to spend on niceties. They had taken three castles in two weeks.</p><p>Behind him, the courtyard was still ringing with furious steel and gunpowder. This one would put up a fight – it was a graf’s seat, after all, not some countryside freiherr’s. Ander was not worried. He had never been worried. Storming up the dusty hillside trail before him, the cavalry of the people’s army was coming.</p><p>Festus Detrich was coming, on his brute of a roan mare, guiding her steppe-style with his knees with pistol in one hand and sabre in another. His plait bound with a flash of red leather whipped behind him. He led twenty men on stolen horses, but in his wake they might have been two thousand of hell’s demons.</p><p>He flashed past Ander and snapped a salute with his gun as he went. His sword was already arcing to bite bone-deep into an enemy’s raised arm. Ander turned to watch the riders crash into the melee, taking pleased stock of the defenders’ open terror. The graf’s men should have had horses. They would have, if the graf’s own stable hands hadn’t sabotaged every piece of tack in the keep. They could have, had the graf not been infamous for his household’s abuses. Now it was too late for that, too: now they would have only Detrich’s justice.</p><p>He moved across stone slick and red, shouting with the men around him – <em>For freedom! For the people! </em>– cutting a path before him, watching out for the less experienced fighters. Saving the lives of stable boys freshly recruited, putting his sword between armed guards and the sons of cobblers and charcoal-burners, pulling milkmaids and wet-nurses in men’s dress to their feet. And all through it, through the bursts of gore and whistles of hot lead, from the corner of his eye he followed the roan mare, the crimson flash. A compass in the chaos.</p><p>It was from the corner of his eye that he saw the mare rear, blood at her neck. Bent over a trembling boy, fifteen if that, he dared not remove the shield of his blade and body. Saw only glimpses of Detrich throwing himself off and away from his collapsing mount. Heard a wail begin to rise. Heard the blast of Detrich’s voice across the courtyard – “<em>fight, damn you all!” </em>– breathless but irresistible. The din of the fight closed up again like water over the stone of the moment.</p><p>Ander knew nothing but the scream of steel against steel until the red flash was abruptly at the edge of his vision again, and he realized he and Detrich were fighting back to back.</p><p>“All right, Kirschen?”</p><p>“Never better.”</p><p>Detrich was not a man who laughed or smiled when fighting. But he spared half a step back so that his shoulder brushed Ander’s own.</p><p>If their lodestone’s brief fall had spooked the attackers, his rise galvanized them beyond all fear. Very soon the fighting had died down and the last of the graf’s men were being lined up against the keep wall. The bells had gone silent: in another moment, a young soldier – one of Ander’s own – thrust his head outside the high window to shout down that the graf was dead and all his family captured. The people’s army raised a deafening cheer. The cool rush of battle melting through his limbs, flowing into warmer satisfaction, Ander turned around as the revolutionaries began to congregate around their leader –</p><p>- turned just in time to grab Detrich’s arm as he swayed and very nearly fell.</p><p>Detrich swore aloud as Ander caught nearly all his weight, some near-unintelligible growl. Around them shouts of alarm were rising again. Ander had no time for such nonsense. He looked Detrich over and saw it at once, the blood trickling down the long dark plait, running the crimson ribbon nearly black. A jagged cut across the temple, into the hairline – not a serious wound in itself – Detrich’s eyes were glazed over and he was clearly too dizzy to stand on his own. One man’s cry right in his ear made him wince awfully. His throat worked in a sure sign of nausea settling in.</p><p>Ander snapped, “Back, all you fools!”</p><p>They retreated from him as though from swung blade. Detrich shot him a stern look at that, though not with great effect, all things given. “Nothing – it’s nothing – “ he waved a graceless hand. “Hit my head jumping off horseback, that’s all – the graf, I need to see –“</p><p>“That’s in hand.” The throng around them shifted aside before the rumbling voice and fat, fierce form of Major Gustav Basholme. Ander breathed relief. Basholme was Detrich’s closest friend, doubly respected for that and for his own frightful competence: he was also the only man of the lot who ever stood a chance of stopping Detrich from doing exactly what he willed. “It’s our fourth damned castle, Detrich, we’ve learned a thing or two. Is he dying?”</p><p>“Not as we speak,” Ander answered, smooth over Detrich’s affronted, “Sun’s <em>sake, </em>Gus!”</p><p>“Then what is this lot gawking at? All of you to your duties! You, go get the surgeon. Kirschen, take him inside.”</p><p>Ander blinked. It was only sensible, of course, no call to keep a concussed and bleeding man out in the blazing summer sun, surrounded by chaos and corpses, when the quiet shelter of the keep stood right to hand. But he had not expected – “Me?”</p><p>“And <em>keep </em>him inside,” Basholme added, which clarified things only marginally.</p><p>Navigating the still protesting Detrich into the keep took some effort: Ander suspected he permitted it only because all of his much-degraded focus was on keeping his stomach from open rebellion. The attackers had made shambles of the hall, but Ander found a drawing room reasonably undisturbed, where a cool corner contained an armchair next to a small bookshelf. It might have been someone’s favourite spot once, They had had the like in Estgardt, and Ander himself had enjoyed their peace many times as freiherr of his own keep. Before Detrich had driven him, much too gently if he were honest, to understand what it meant to buy such peace at the cost of other men’s labour and sweat. Fifty years – but that was the past.</p><p>He was making right. No need for guilt and shame. Only for action.</p><p>The carpet of the drawing room was thick and colourful, an extravagance in fabric. Detrich looked at it, seemed to conclude satisfaction with both the privacy and appropriateness of the setting, and at last allowed himself to be violently sick.</p><p>“<em>Damn</em> it all,” he choked out, shaking, flushed with embarrassment and rage, as Ander eased him back into the armchair. “Let me out of here, I have work to do – “</p><p>“You have a concussion.” Ander took the canteen from his belt and the handkerchief from his breast-pocket, and soaked a corner of the latter before handing out the former for Detrich to rinse out his mouth. Steady and methodical. Detrich was agitated enough. Alarm would serve no one. He steeled his hand to dab at the wound. “This is not our men’s first conquest. Have some faith.”</p><p>“I have every faith – “</p><p>“Then stay still.”</p><p>“I need to – “</p><p>The white fabric came away all crimson. Head wounds bled. It was normal. “Too much movement will only make you ill again.” Perfectly normal. If only Detrich would settle. He had seen how little mind the man had paid the injuries from a brutal flogging not two months before: back then he had thought it a reluctance to show weakness. Reasonable, given Detrich’s circumstances. He’d given it no further thought.</p><p>This was something else; something deeper, bared by the crack of dazedness and confusion. It was hard to look at. “Detrich – “</p><p>“- need to be there. To see with my own eyes. My revolution – “ he managed to grab onto Ander’s wrist. If his hand was unsteady, his grip was still iron. “They need me to –“</p><p>In a thrust of decision, Ander clamped his fingers over Detrich’s own. “<em>I </em>need you to stay here.”</p><p>The entanglement was not something Detrich had expected. Nn odd, faint jolt ran all through his body, and he stared for a moment at their linked hands. Ander worked his level best not to freeze. He had never frozen at any of the many fraught touches of his life: he would be several shades of damned if he began now. Softly, he said, “You are injured and not thinking clearly. Is your confidence in Basholme so scarce that you cannot entrust the revolution to him for an hour?”</p><p>He had misspoken, he thought when Detrich bristled. His instinct was to remove his hand. He did not, and felt the strain in Detrich’s fingers as they curled tight – a heartbeat – and then, a loosening.</p><p>“No.” Detrich dropped his head back, his eyes falling shut. “Gus is as good as my own hand. I trust him… and I trust you.”</p><p>His hand went slack. Slowly, Ander untangled his own. Perhaps there had been some alarm, he was forced to admit. He could not otherwise explain the depth, the warmth of his feelings of relief.</p><p>He turned back to wiping away the blood, the sweat and the dirt. The surgeon would do it better, certainly; yet here and now, it was what he could do. There was a quietude in the whisper of wet fabric over skin. A grace in the very smallness of the gesture. And he knew that Detrich felt it, saw how it braced him through the stabs of nausea and agitation. Minute contact, serving little real purpose. Yet it made a wall to lean on, a roof to shelter under.</p><p>They were dangerous thoughts, another part of his mind whispered. Dangerous, treacherous thoughts and feelings. He had had their like before. He knew where they led, where they inevitably led. Nowhere he cared to take the gift of Detrich’s trust. From the great hall next door he could hear men moving, the shoeshiners and milkmaids of the people’s army coming in to be dazzled at the grandeur of their prize. No celebrated victory at the head of a column of elite troops had ever given him such satisfaction as this. It would be enough.</p><p>The wound had stopped bleeding. Detrich’s shoulders had loosened as much as they ever did. He had grown stiff with a spike of renewed impatience at the sound of his men, but now was sinking back in the chair, more than Ander liked. “Sit up. You cannot fall asleep.”</p><p>“When can I ever,” Detrich groused, muzzy, but obeyed readily enough.</p><p>“Think of it as making use of your insomnia for once.” The comment was rewarded with a snort, doubtful but appreciative. Ander moved to wipe what he could of the blood caked in Detrich’s plait. “Speak to me of something.”</p><p>“What?”</p><p>“Anything. The point is the talking.” He was not sure what Detrich would manage just at the moment: he did not seem to have the focus for strategy or the energy for politics, and gifted soldier though he was he rarely joined in soldiers’ talk of feats of conquest. Ander wondered if instead Detrich might speak of his village, somewhere in the backwater Southwest, that he had never named; of his father, that Ander knew had also been a soldier; perhaps something, anything, that would unlock the mystery of his words from weeks ago, <em>Where have you been all these years?</em></p><p>But after a long moment of struggle, Detrich’s roving eyes found the shelf of books.</p><p>All at once his head lifted. “I’ll tell you something. That one – hand it over, will you? –  that’s the <em>Epos</em>, Yulinus of Aldeb. Marvellous piece of work. Terrible translation. Spent months slaving over it with every dictionary in the library –“</p><p>“Which library?”</p><p>“The capitol university’s. I studied law, but the histories – “</p><p>“You studied in the capitol?”</p><p>“Only two years. My sponsor, he stopped… but I read every history in that library. I loved Yulinus best, though the <em>Epos</em> is only half history if that – thank you – “ he clasped the book with both hands as soon as Ander passed it over, thumbs stroking over the cover. “I can’t count how many nights it saw me through. Sun’s grace, it’s been years…”</p><p>He opened the book to a random page, lay his palm flat on the paper. It left a stain, blood and dirt: he stared at it, aghast.</p><p>None of it was what Ander had been expecting. And yet there it was, something beyond strategy or politics or even the fight. Something private, cherished. Almost shy. It was the last word he would have associated with Detrich. Thinking it felt half like sacrilege.</p><p>The other half felt more dangerous yet.</p><p>He reached for the book, which Detrich gave up with visible reluctance. “Your condition does not lend itself to reading.”</p><p>“I know…” He was not, Ander thought, referring only to the head wound. “I know.”</p><p>There was an offer. A suggestion Ander could make, with how clearly Detrich longed for the words behind that cover. It would not need to be a very great thing. Every excuse was at hand. He had offered the shave, weeks before when they had known each other all of three days, and Detrich had accepted without a breath of suspicion or wariness. As though there was nothing to <em>be</em> wary of. He had welcomed Ander’s blade against his throat and Ander’s fingers on his bare skin, and had again, now, trusted Ander’s sword at his back and Ander’s hands at an open wound –</p><p>It would have to be enough.</p><p>“But I have not read Yulinus, myself, since I was a boy,” he said instead. “So you may well tell me what you remember of the story.”</p><p>Hazed though they were, Detrich’s eyes lit up. An almost physical light, brightening the fathomless depth of that blue. “You’ll regret it. I’m told I go on unbearably when history is concerned, and that’s without a concussion.”</p><p>“I think I shall do perfectly well,” Ander said; and he did.</p>
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<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Chapter 3</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“They’ll come,” Detrich said, with perfect certainty and vibrating impatience.</p><p>Even in a whisper, his voice filled the tiny cellar, its depth seeming to send shivers through the rock. In the near-perfect dark Ander’s every sense strained like a desperate hand scrabbling for solid purchase. The thick layer of hay on the floor above them muffled the sounds of the farmstead, while his and Detrich’s breathing seemed fearfully loud. Everything smelled musty, thick: a scent that clung to the back of the throat with the late-summer heat and now and then set them sneezing and coughing when they could ill afford to. The Royalist patrols had been swarming over the village for more than a day. One errant sound, and the revolution would lose two leaders in one moment.</p><p>Wretched bad luck to have him and Detrich forced into the same precarious hiding place. But the tight quarters were worst of all. Just enough room for two men to sit side by side with their knees drawn to their chests. They could not so much as breathe without brushing against each other.</p><p>It was dazingly hot. Ander found himself breathing as little as he could.</p><p>“They’ll come,” Detrich murmured again. He repeated the words or their like every quarter-hour or so; perhaps it helped him tell the passage of time. From another man, Ander would have thought it an attempt at self-reassurance. Or self-persuasion.</p><p><em>They’ll come</em>. He was not himself doubtful – not notably so. The people’s army controlled the nearest city, and contingencies had been put in place for just such a situation in which a small force was trapped in a village. He had planned several of them himself. Rescue was a matter of nothing more than patience and perseverance. And surviving a sneeze at the wrong moment, of course.</p><p>And the heat. The heat. Ander said his daily prayers to the Sun with all the sincerity a man of his circumstances could put into them. But now he thought, since he was by his very being already an affront to Her natural order, he may as well permit himself the brief sacrilege of a wish for night. Sweat was trickling unbearably down his back. Under the sweetness of the hay he could smell his own body – and Detrich’s. Unmistakably different somehow. Masculine, healthy, too familiar to be unpleasant.</p><p>He did not know how the other man endured the heat. Detrich had always run hot, as though the fire of the revolution was truly in his blood. In the darkness of the cellar, his closeness was a furnace. It made Ander think of molten iron running in the forge.</p><p>His head felt heavy. His knees had for some time been reminding him of his age, but it was growing difficult to dismiss them out of hand. He was beginning to wonder how Detrich, his whole being coiled tight around his fervour and his rage, could endure the stillness. Detrich’s breathing was even, but loud – perhaps echoing more than loud, but then close – so close. Ander half imagined he could hear his heartbeat.</p><p>With the barest brush of their shoulders together, unavoidable, he half imagined that heartbeat thrumming into his own flesh.</p><p>It was absurd. Obscene. He was fifty years old. If his knees could remember it, surely so could the rest of his body. He forced a swallow down a dry throat. He ought to be inured to hiding, had all his adult life been hiding. He ought to – <em>Sun help me </em>– the revolution had given him so much freedom, Detrich had given him – he could not stay here, choked up and buried once more, he could not –</p><p>Detrich had said, <em>The whispers don’t matter to me</em>. But in this press of bodies, Ander’s wretched, traitor body –</p><p>The gasp was in his throat, the thrust in his legs, to push himself up and out out <em>out – </em>and Detrich’s voice sounded.</p><p>“They’ll come.”</p><p>His tone had not changed. In the dark, Ander could not see where his gaze was turned. And still he knew. That repetition, on the clock, mountain-steady and utterly certain. Daring the world to prove him wrong.</p><p>He pulled in a breath – the air still syrupy with heat, yet lighter. It buoyed his baking brain. He reached desperately for that lightness in his mind, grasping after clarity as a falling man after purchase. Was still scrambling when he felt Detrich tense all over beside him.</p><p>His first thought was the hay, that unreasonably powerful nuisance. But no sound followed – except, after a moment, a strangled hiss of pain. He felt Detrich fight not to shift in place, a hard tremor running down his spine. Then understanding came, and clarity with it: he’d seen Detrich suffer such spasms before, a lingering effect of his battle-scarred back. More frequent since the flogging, he’d said, but no great trouble even as such, easily resolved with some purposeful stretching. He had the routine so well-practiced that he was often done with it before even Ander noticed his discomfort.</p><p>There was no room to stretch in the cellar. How painful the spasm could grow if unchecked, how long it might last, Ander had no idea.</p><p>He knew Detrich was suffering. That much was impossible to overlook. It all but changed the tang of the other man’s sweat, put acrid distress into it. It did away with all else in his mind, and his body followed suit in dismissing heat, thrumming and all. He did not hesitate to move his hand to touch Detrich’s back. Detrich had never turned away from his touch when given in comfort and care.</p><p>It took only a moment to find the core of the pain: with his palm flat, Ander could feel the puckered scars in muscles clenched as hard as stone. The first press of his fingers there made Detrich choke. But it did not make him wince away. He endured the press, and endured, as Ander – by pure instinct, guided only by the currents of trembling and relaxation in the body he was touching – kneaded the flesh bit by bit into ease. He was growing wise to this, Ander thought, eerily light: the slow way in which Detrich’s body gave up its tensions, the inch by inch easing of his shoulders, tender and trepidatious, as though every unburdening was a surprise.</p><p>And wise to this, too: that when that body, that aching mortal cage of a wildfire soul, calmed under his touch, all in the world was right.</p><p>A part of him was not so easily fooled. He was what he was – his touch was never a blameless thing. He knew perfectly well the truth of the twistedness of his nature, that poisoned every tenderness he might offer. But he did not think even he could poison Detrich. A well could be poisoned: but not the sea.</p><p>It must not have been very long, as his hand was still pressed to Detrich’s back when from above, through the hay and all, there came the sound of gunfire.</p><p>A frustrating difficulty, with guns, that they sounded all alike in the hands of friends and foes. Impossible to tell who had the upper hand. Once more all thought left Ander’s mind, except the knowledge that he only had his pistol to hand – three bullets – and Detrich his knife – which he wielded like a devil, but that would not impress a troop of gunmen – and in the dark they could not even look at each other as they waited with bated breath for what may be the last –</p><p>Until boots thundered over the floor, kicking aside the piled hay, and Gus Basholme’s voice came roaring, “Detrich! Kirschen! If you died I hope you rot in hell!”</p><p>Detrich was on his feet in an instant, loosened like a bowstring, shoving up the cellar door. Basholme let out a whoop of laughter at the sight of him, yanked him up by one arm and pulled him into rib-crushing hug before Detrich could as much as get through <em>What took so damned long. </em>Ander rose more slowly, mindful of his knees and dizzy with the rush of open air. He could think of nothing but a desperate thirst. His eyes were slow to readjust to the light, his ears to the noise around him. Such noise… <em>oh</em>.</p><p>Basholme’s men had cheered at the sight of Detrich. Now, Ander realized, they were now cheering at the sight of him, too.</p><p>In the moment, it was almost too much for the senses to take in. He almost stumbled – would have – he had never in his life stumbled, but in the moment – </p><p>But that Detrich had extricated himself from Basholme’s grasp and was turning to him, smiling brilliantly as he handed out a canteen brimming with cold water, his eyes the colour of a free and open sky.</p>
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<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Chapter 4</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The dome of the chill autumn night was like black crystal, studded with distant icicle stars, but beneath him Ander’s horse was in a desperate lather. His breath mingled with the cloud of the animal’s puffing. Sweat ran into his eyes, hot then swiftly cooling, stinging, making him squint into an already heavy dark. But little of it registered: he knew exactly where and how swiftly he must go.</p><p>Detrich had not made the rendezvous point, the report had said.<em> We don’t know where he is, </em>the empty-eyed young man had said –<em> if he’s alive.</em></p><p>Some distance downriver, like pale eyes, he could make out the lights of the Royalists’ boats. The sound of men calling out to each other as they scoured the waters was comfort of sorts: they were still searching, themselves. Ander knew the codes in the shouts drifted across the dark water. Knee deep in the reeds, where the river ran into canals swollen with autumn rains, he put a hand on his horse’s nose to quiet the beast. The icy water prickled at his feet even through his riding boots. The far-off lantern beams pierced through the moonless murk, silvered the rushing river. The night creatures had all fallen into a breathless silence as booted feet trudged across the fields.</p><p>Sheer madness, the poor scout had said when Ander had announced, <em>I am going to find him</em>. The Royalists were everywhere. To throw away another life after one already lost was senseless. The revolution –</p><p>But Ander had been in the saddle already. Saying only, <em>Lad</em>, <em>Festus Detrich </em>is <em>the revolution. </em></p><p>He left his horse tied unsaddled by the canal, indistinguishable in the dark from any farmland beast, and crept along the riverbank, wise to the soldiers’ search pattern – a pattern he had used himself, many times, in a past little worth remembering. Using the cover of the ditches and the little fishing piers. The Royalist soldiers might ravage this stretch of land if their search did not yield results, tear up the undergrowth, drag the villagers’ little boats from their shelters and pull them apart. And then they might get to the villages themselves, to drag out suspected sympathizers and tear them apart as well. Crouched under the trailing canopy of an old willow, Ander shuddered at the thought. Detrich would be livid if it came to that, and brutal in his revenge. If he still lived.</p><p>Ander did not know where that <em>if</em> had come from. It was no thought for a disciplined mind; he banished it without mercy.</p><p>At last, breathing hard and feeling every year of his age like anchor weights about his bones, he could just make out the outline of a bridge rising through the gloom. The ruins of one, really. That part of the mission at least had been a triumph, and the others assigned all returning alive and well. This was madness, returning to the scene to creep in the dark after one man – or his body.</p><p>But the dark was full of visions: Detrich mocking the whip, waking downtrodden men to the gun in their hands. Detrich blazing up the trail to take the graf’s keep. Detrich’s murmuring voice in a much worse dark than this, <em>They’ll come</em>.</p><p>Somewhere in the dark was the brightest fire in all the world. And Ander would find him, or wander in that dark forever. </p><p>The bank and shallows under the bridge were littered with wreckage, bricks and bigger chunks of stone piled haphazardly. As he leaned on one, it shifted under his weight, precariously balanced for its size. A sudden thought struck him: yes, that was just the kind of creative daring under the worst duress he might have expected…</p><p>He picked his way around the debris until he found it, an angled pile that offered a natural crawlspace. Ander had to feel his way in, hands and knees in the freezing water, hearing nothing but the river’s rush. Until he heard laboured breathing, and smelled blood.</p><p>He had to do everything by feel. Feel for the body, find its shape inside the space. Feel the hot edges of lacerated flesh. No guarantee that it was safe to move the man, but the best he had to go on. By feel, to grab the body under the arms and drag it out inch by inch. And finally, they were under just enough starlight that he could recognize Detrich’s face.</p><p>Fifty years of life, thirty years of military service and command, were not enough to stop Ander’s sob of desperate relief. <em>Alive, alive — </em></p><p>Alive, and badly hurt, colourless with blood loss and cold. Detrich’s skin felt like meat hung in an icehouse. Red still oozed sluggishly from the knife wound slashing up from his left side across his ribs. <em>He must have lain here for hours. </em>With no reason to think anyone would come – but Ander had. And now here he was, crouched over the unconscious man as though his body was a shelter, but of course it offered neither protection nor true warmth… <em>Do I ride? Riding will chill him even further. Warming him will make the bleeding faster. Sun’s mercy, let me breathe, let me think. He needs, he needs…</em></p><p><em>He needs me immovable. </em>This, he could do. Always.</p><p>He left his heart to roar in his ears as it pleased and thought of nothing but easing Detrich’s body into his arms, cautious in arranging the man’s limp weight. As Ander braced for the moment of rising from his protesting knees to his feet, Detrich stirred faintly against him, choking off his moan of pain even in his half-aware state. He mumbled something unclear, and then again:</p><p>“Ander.”</p><p>“Hush,” Ander murmured back. “I have you.”</p><p>“Why’re you here?”</p><p>“Did you expect me to leave you?”</p><p>“Had orders…”</p><p>“The revolution’s first mutineer should not speak to me about orders,” Ander said with fierce fondness. Detrich’s long water-logged hair was soaking the front of his uniform. He was starting to shiver.</p><p>Detrich was silent for a moment, then let out the ghost of a laugh.</p><p>“I trust you,” he mumbled, and faded again.</p><p>Ander thought his knees must be furious with him, as must his back, his shoulders, all those useless old parts of him. But he rose and forgot them all until he had walked half a mile back to his mount, hunched in the darkness all the while. Until he was struggling onto horseback, somehow arranging Detrich’s unconscious form in front of him, and knowing in that moment of struggle that they would never make it back to the base. There were villages along the river, and one, he remembered, housed a midwife who had lent the people’s army her aid as a healer before. Detrich would have balked at bringing danger to her doorstep. But Detrich trusted him.</p><p>He did not dare think as much as another word past that, until he was leaping off his horse to hammer against the door of the small farmhouse, breathless past prayer.</p><p>The door opened, and Ander was face to face with a carving knife.</p><p>The midwife – Hedi, that was her name – held it with trembling fingers. She was fully dressed, down to the cap pulled over her short dun hair, as though ready to flee. “Who are you?”</p><p><em>What do I say? What can I ask? </em>He breathed in through suddenly chattering teeth. “Ander Kirschen, frowe, I —”</p><p>“Kirschen?” Her eyes rounded. “General – <em>Freiherr</em> Kirschen?”</p><p><em>No</em>, he almost said, briefly dizzy: he had not heard <em>Freiherr Kirschen </em>in months. “Yes. I’ve an injured comrade in urgent need – “</p><p>“You’re the ones the soldiers are looking for.” Hedi swallowed hard, seemed to steel herself. “I – this is a lot to ask, General. The village – they rely on me – “</p><p>“Please. If only for the night —”</p><p>“I – “</p><p>She stopped short, her gaze abruptly past him. Looking at the horse a handful of paces behind, Ander realized, and Detrich slumped over in the saddle. The revolution, slowly but surely bleeding out…</p><p>But when he turned to look, Detrich was standing.</p><p>Not only standing – up and erect, not even leaning on the horse for support. Bleeding, sure enough, a curtain of near-black drawn down his body, his hair another curtain about his ashen face. And yet alive; and yet meeting Hedi’s astonished eyes, and bowing his head.</p><p>“Frowe Hirsche.” It was only the shadow of his voice, but the knife fell from Hedi’s hand. “I’m sorry, I had hoped to come to you with better news.”</p><p>“Fro Detrich, Sun’s mercy – “</p><p>“But the bridge is gone. And if that will not do for me, I ask you at least give my officer shelter.”</p><p>“Sun’s mercy,” Hedi whispered again, then spoke up with full clarity, “Come in, both of you. Quickly, come in.”</p><p>She turned on her heels and sped into the house, leaving the sound of a swallowed sob in her wake. Ander could not think of any question that could not wait. He rushed to Detrich’s side – and was there just in time to catch him full in his arms.</p><p>Snuffed out like a candle. Not even another word. Shivering all over, violent, torturous spasms, fresh blood coming faster from the wound. But alive, alive, alive.</p><p>Hedi waved off Ander’s murmur of thanks as she led him to the little house’s hearth. She looked to have swallowed a rush of tears and been strengthened for that draught. He lay Detrich down by the core of dancing light and heat, and was surprised when Hedi pressed a cup of hot stew into his hands as soon as they were free.</p><p>“You look half frozen yourself,” she said to his blank stare. </p><p>His hands and feet, useless old things, chose that moment to remember that he, too, had waded in the frozen water and crawled in it to his shoulders under the ruins of the bridge. The thought of burdening her with his care was inconceivable. Ander took the cup and drained it without waiting for the soup to chill: it burned his mouth and throat, but that was really past minding.</p><p>Hedi knelt down and began undoing Detrich’s jacket. “I’m no battlefield surgeon,” she told Ander. “But my sons are too young to fight, so I suppose… sometimes, we are called.”</p><p>“And your husband?”</p><p>“Dead this past spring. A fever took him in the graf’s jailhouse.” Her lips drew a bloodless line. “Jailed for not paying the bridge toll.”</p><p><em>The bridge is gone</em>. But a woman alone, with young children… <em>he asked shelter for me. </em>“We impose on you —”</p><p>“Fro Detrich will pay me back,” Hedi whispered under the crackling of her hearth-fire, “when his men hang the Graf in the village square.”</p><p>She continued working with expert hands used to all the aches of the world: pulling a half-frozen man out of his soaking clothes was the least of the tasks those hands had taken up. Ander wrenched himself away to go out, unsaddle and chase away his horse. In the distance he could just make out the lanterns of the Royalist soldiers at their search. There would be frantic worry at base, even with the clear orders he had left and with Basholme due to arrive in a day’s time. No telling when the Royalist patrols might slacken off their search enough to let a message be safely sent through…</p><p>But the revolution was here. </p><p>When he returned, Hedi had Detrich wrapped in a tatty wool blanket and was spreading out his hair to help it dry. He was still shivering every bit as badly and was still every bit as grey, a frightful undertone to the copper of his skin. Ander knelt at his left side to look at the wound across his torso. It looked more wide than deep, though the blade had gone well into the muscle and bitten at large-enough vessels so that blood oozed even now. He glanced up at Hedi. “The bleeding will get worse as his body warms – “</p><p>She shook her head. “The cold worries me more. See if you can get some soup into him while I get my kit.” </p><p>Forcing liquid down the throat of an unconscious man was a risk, but one Ander decided to take. He remembered the chill of the river. <em>He had lain there for hours. </em>Every time he thought that, his own spine prickled and stiffened and he felt his own blood turn sluggish. <em>Was I too late? </em>He moved until he could carefully raise Detrich up and brace him on his knees, tilting his head up against one arm. Then he fell still for a moment, staring at the unmoving face lifted close to his. He had seen this done before, but had never thought it would fall to him. Another thing he had never thought about. There were countless. Before Detrich.</p><p>It stood to reason. He had been another man, living another life. If it had been a life at all.</p><p>“General,” Hedi’s voice came softly. She passed him the mug full of soup.</p><p>Ander took it, put it to Detrich’s lips. Was surprised when Detrich’s eyes slivered open, a dim flash of blue full of confusion under eyebrows faintly knotting. But those lips opened to Ander’s coaxing, and he swallowed a small sip, then another, drop by drop.</p><p><em>I have you, </em>Ander thought all the while, unable to quite stop. <em>I have you</em>. </p><p>They were halfway through the mug when Hedi returned with her linens, her scissors and needles. She probed the length of the injury, mumbled in thought and low distress. She did not ask Ander to lay Detrich down, and as she began to thread needle through mangled flesh, Ander stayed breathlessly still. Immovable.</p><p>Hedi’s fingers never faltered. But she murmured, “If the soldiers come…”</p><p>“I shall stand watch. If I spot them nearby, I shall turn myself in and tell them he is dead and buried.”</p><p>“Surely you aren’t – the people’s army needs you.”</p><p>“Not nearly so much as it needs him.”</p><p>The pause before her answer was a suffocating void, the way she studied Detrich’s still face, his bloodied body with open uncertainty. “He… will be off his feet for a long time, even if recovery is smooth. I can’t even say when he might wake up.”</p><p>“You do not know him, Frowe Hirsche.” Ander shook his head: a minute gesture, one that surely should not have made that head feel heavy and spinning on his neck. “By tomorrow, he will call this a small thing.”</p><p>Hedi said nothing, but her eyes were dark. <em>A small thing</em>, Ander repeated to himself. Easy enough to imagine Detrich’s voice, in all its depth and breadth, saying the words. All he had ever seen Detrich make of pain was fury, impatience, defiance. Even ordinary comfort often seemed to baffle him. <em>It will be a small thing, once he wakes</em>.</p><p>At long last, Hedi sat back with an exhale and wiped a smear of blood through the sweat on her brow. Her bandaging was tight and neat, and under Ander’s hands he felt Detrich’s pulse beat slow but steady. Decisive somehow. Together they wrapped him as securely as they could in the blanket, and watched to see his shivering begin bit by bit to ease, and Ander rose to add an armful of firewood to the hearth. And then there was silence, and the inevitability of the night ahead.</p><p>“It’s best if he stays by the fire,” Hedi said as he offered her an arm to pull herself up by. “You too, once you’ve changed into dry clothes. I’ll find you something, you’re about my husband’s height. Might borrow something for him…”</p><p>“Your kindness humbles me.” He saw a flicker of colour in her cheeks at the words. It occurred to him that she was probably shocked by being spoken to so by <em>Freiherr Kirschen</em>, and the thought needled at his gut. “I cannot make promises, but I shall do all I can to keep you safe.”</p><p>“Oh, safe… my husband died for some unpaid pennies. Who was ever <em>safe</em>? It’s better, unsafe but fighting. Fro Detrich, he knows.” She wiped her face again, red across her cheeks and eyelashes. “I’m not a brave woman, but… I suppose sometimes, we are called. We’ll see how well I answered in the morning. Was he wounded in the explosion? It’s been hours.”</p><p>She did not mean to gut him, Ander told himself wearily. It would be hours more until morning. “In combat, I suspect, and was unwilling to risk capture if he could not return to camp. I found him hiding from the patrols under the wreckage. In the river.”</p><p>Hedi nodded solemnly. "That was fortunate in some ways. The water did wash out the wound, and the cold slowed the bleeding. That’s saved me some concerns. But - "</p><p>The <em>but </em>stopped Ander cold. <em>A small thing</em>, he tried to think. And yet looking down at the still shivering form at the feet of the fire, his mind filled suddenly with that gaping black <em>if</em>. The darkened world from which light trickled away like lifeblood down the icy river…</p><p>He rasped out, "Was I too late?”</p><p>"Not too late." her voice grew gentle. Ander struggled to keep still in the face of it, and under the tentative burst of relief. <em>I cannot let her think me so fragile. </em>"The wound in itself is not too severe, and you got to him before the cold did lasting damage. I can tell his strength... but he’ll needs time, and rest. If he tries to shrug it off…”</p><p>She was making an appeal, Ander realized, as if she believed he had any power whatsoever to persuade Detrich to rest easier. "We must return as soon as we can. The revolution –"</p><p>"The revolution will need to stay in bed."</p><p>Ander glanced down again. <em>Will I need to save you again? Have I saved you at all?</em></p><p>“Wait until morning,” Hedi spoke gently again, as though not realizing how much her gentleness threatened to unman him. “And look after yourself, Freihe- General. Eat some soup and go to sleep. I’ll stay up to watch him, I’m well used to it. And you…” she hesitated. “You aren’t as young as he is.</p><p><em>I know</em>. Of all inevitables, there was none like time. Ander began to undo his jacket with stiff fingers, old fingers, no longer suited to gentleness if ever they had been. For the revolution, he could not afford to carelessly become ill or render himself less than ever able. He changed into the dead Fro Hirsche’s clothes, which he noted were just broad enough in the shoulders to fit Detrich as well as himself, and drank as much soup as Hedi pressed on him. Then he settled in the rickety chair by the fire, and his body said, <em>Sleep, old man, sleep.</em></p><p>But Detrich trusted him. The Royalists might come to the door, or Hedi might need his help, or Detrich might wake and call for him in the night.</p><p>It didn’t seem likely, that last thing. Detrich was sunk deeper in unconsciousness than Ander had ever seen him. And yet that <em>might</em>, silent and relentless, kept Ander wide awake until dawn.</p><p> </p><p>But in the morning, Detrich did not wake: instead, he began to burn.</p><p>The fever sank a claw into him at first light, and by midday had swelled into a gripping fist. Not unexpected, Hedi said early on, between the wound, the chill, and the shock, and Ander had seen injured soldiers enough to know she was right. Yet by evening she was fretful and muttering, checking the wound hourly for signs of infection and taking dismayed stock of her herbs. And all Ander could see was Detrich’s sunken eyes, the rising tide of sweat on his skin, the shivers running down to his bones.</p><p>That <em>if</em> in the dark. <em>If he still lived.</em> <em>If recovery is smooth</em>. And if not –</p><p>Hedi bundled her two sons off to a sister-in-law’s house and gave their bed to her patient. Ander spent the first day in a chair besides it, dozing now and then, struggling to balance the need to keep up his strength with equal need to remain alert, and finding both needs poorly served by it. His one relief was that Hedi’s nephew, a clever and even-tempered youth kept from the battlefield by a weak constitution, had long had a plan in place to keep watch over the healer’s house in just such circumstances. Every hour some eager adolescent would appear at the door to report the all-clear. A dutiful lot, even if none older than fourteen. Detrich would have liked them. Would have known how to speak to them, his kin in suffocating oppression and burning defiance. But Detrich was buried in his fever-sleep, and Ander did not know any right words to say.</p><p>At least they asked no questions, for the most part. He supposed they must have been warned off it. Only one girl stayed longer than a moment or two, to whisper, “Are you really Freiherr General Kirschen?”</p><p>“General only. I have renounced my title and holdings.”</p><p>“What does ‘renounced’ mean?”</p><p><em>Sun help me. </em>Ander cleared his throat with some difficulty. “It means – I am – I’ve given them up. Anyway I cannot have them, as a traitor to the crown. If I am captured, I will hang like a commoner.”</p><p>She seemed as stunned by that as a bird by a gunshot. Then she said, “You gave it up for him?”</p><p>“For – for the revolution. He made me see it was just.”</p><p>“The others say, if he dies you will be commander of the people’s army.”</p><p>At that moment Hedi came in, and chased the girl out quickly enough that Ander did not think either of them saw him go white as a corpse.</p><p>The <em>if </em>curled solidly around the base of his windpipe now, filled the gaps in his ribcage until his lungs struggled to expand. No Royalist soldiers came to test the protection of his sword. Nor could he offer much help to Hedi in changing dressings and brewing medicine. Come evening, with his young spies reporting that the Royalist patrols were moving on, he took brief respite in writing a missive that a village girl volunteered to take to the nearest city concealed in her wedding dress. Kindness was all around him, and courage. But all else he could do was sit and wipe a cool cloth over Detrich’s face, taut and tense in unconsciousness that was no relief from pain. And if his touch made some of that grimace soften, if Detrich’s laboured breathing came easier for it, he dared not call it enough.</p><p>The next day passed in this haze, and most of the next, with no response to his missive and no reprieve for Detrich being hour by hour consumed in his own heat. Early in the third day Ander began to lose track of time, began drifting into looking back at a life that looked like so much chaff, the dry husks of identity and accomplishment. For a little while, he thought there had been a seed there: freed and true, budding under Detrich’s hand. What a grand thing it was, to be the man that Detrich looked at him and saw.</p><p><em>And if… </em>he could not picture himself commanding the people’s army. The revolution. The revolution lay on the bed before him, fighting for life with little but Ander’s touch – his touch, which could never be a pure thing – to lend any aid.</p><p>A man lay before him: that singular visionary, sure enough, bent on reshaping his country and people like iron in the flames. But the brightest light in the world was a man, also. The man who laughed to see his comrades, who lit up when pulled into a friend’s embrace, who rode like a demon and spoke of histories with a schoolboy’s excitement. Who had looked at Ander and whispered, <em>Where have you been all these years? </em>as though there had been something he had longed for.</p><p>“Kirschen!”</p><p>The thundering voice slammed Ander away from the edge of sleep. It was the very dead of night. At the door to the little room, Gus Basholme stood wild-eyed and dishevelled from a desperate riding. A sight for sore eyes.</p><p>“Gus!” Ander all but leapt to his feet. At last, at last, duty had come calling. “My message – “</p><p>“Should’ve known better than to hope you were exaggerating. Sun’s blood! You half look like it’s you that’s dying. What – “</p><p>“The bridge, our men, how does it stand? I have had no news – “</p><p>“You’ll have all of it. Sit down. Let me – “ it was eerie to see Basholme, that cannonball of a man, pause to master himself. Unnerving to hear a crack run through his voice. “Let me see him.”</p><p>Like a heaving of cold earth on an ember, the sound of it snuffed out Ander’s moment of stirring energy. He moved aside and turned to watch Basholme slump to sit on the end of the bed. Detrich’s oldest friend, his ablest officer, the only one in the people’s army who never seemed to hold him in any kind of reverence more fit for symbol than man… Basholme’s stout frame seemed hollowed out now. He put his face in his hands, and for a moment his silence was louder than his voice had ever been.</p><p>Then he pulled up, the sharp snap of a soldier coming to attention. He looked up at Ander. “Has he improved at all?”</p><p>“The opposite if anything. The fever seems worse today.”</p><p>“Said anything?”</p><p>“Nothing lucid. Names, now and then.”</p><p>“Who – Yoanna?” At Ander’s baffled headshake, Basholme quickly clarified, “His wife. Former wife. Nursed him after his first battle. Worst injury he’s had since then, I think, I hope Festus skewered whoever did like a fish for gutting… what did the surgeon say?”</p><p>“You have not spoken to her?”</p><p>“She’s out and about. Her nephew let me in. He has a whole damned network of toddling spies, did you know…? Mad, the lot of them. The lot of us. The things we do for the revolution. For him.” Basholme’s eyes drifted toward Detrich again, that still, burning and wasting form. He only permitted himself half a glance. “It’s two factions at camp. Arnbau says to even think of the people’s army without Festus is treason. Kessler says if we haven’t elected a new leader within the week the revolution is dead.” He turned where he sat, and now his back was to Detrich and his eyes all on Ander. “Kessler is right.”</p><p>Of course Kessler was right. Ander was too old, had no particular delusions about the workings of armies and revolutions. His old knees nearly gave way, and he dropped into his chair.</p><p>Hollowly, he said, “You’ve come to talk me into this.”</p><p>Basholme ground his teeth. Between them, Detrich’s breathing was fearfully loud. “I’ve come to see my dearest friend on his deathbed. But since you mention it – “</p><p>“Will you not say that!” What was the use? The world was full of beautiful things ravaged and undone. What a grand thing it had been to have brief leave to pretend otherwise. “You bury him still breathing.”</p><p>“Better him than his cause! You must ride back tonight. They’ll all support you, even Arnbau. We might even win over some of those bastards who won’t complain of revolution if it’s a nobleman heading it – “</p><p>“You do it, then. Are you not his right-hand man?”</p><p>“I was, ‘til you turned up – and every day I’m glad you relieved me. I’m a tactician, not a strategist, and no damned leader of the people to be sure.”</p><p>“He trusts you well enough to lead his soldiers.”</p><p>“Any arse on a horse can lead soldiers. He trusts <em>you</em> to lead his revolution.”</p><p><em>He trusts you</em>. Ander’s breath was coming too fast, his skin too hot and insides too cold. <em>He trusts you, and what are you? What were you before him, what could you be if he is gone?</em> “It has not been a week. You know what he is capable of. How can you say that he –“ something thick leapt in his throat, “That he might die?”</p><p>“He’s a man, Ander,” Basholme said, with sudden, wrenching softness.</p><p><em>“</em>I know that.” <em>More than I should</em>. “But he deserves time.”</p><p>“We have no time, and he would have said so, too.”</p><p>“I can’t – “</p><p>“You can’t sit here relying on a cool rag and a miracle. He trusts you, and we need you.”</p><p>“He can’t – “</p><p>"Damn it, <em>listen</em> to me!" Basholme exploded, throwing out both twisted hands, as though just keeping from grabbing Ander’s collar. "He <em>could</em> die. Any moment. Do you understand? He's ill, he's weak, he could die. And no one but you can stand where he has fallen. They all <em>know </em>no one else can. Do you understand?!"</p><p>"I - " The words died as a thin gasp in Ander’s throat. The world was tilted on its axis, and a hundred things roiled and rolled madly about its unsteady ground. <em>I can't lead them. I can’t stand before them when he is gone. I can’t face the people. I can't, I can't</em> – until it rushed out – "I can't <em>live</em> without him, Gus!"</p><p>Basholme flinched back, eyes wide. It gave Ander no more than a handspan of space back, and he slumped in his chair, a hand over his eyes. Speaking the words seemed to have pulled out all solidity from his body. Nothing was left but trembling emptiness.</p><p>"Damn you," Basholme said flatly to his hunched form. "We're in the midst of bloody revolution, and you've gone and fallen in love."<br/><br/><em>Love</em>. He said it without so much as a blink. But Ander knew what it meant. He knew.</p><p>They came swarming in, swollen and angry, all the words he had laboured a lifetime to quiet. They pulsed into ugly life within his brain. <em>Pervert. Aberration. Mockery of a man</em>. He did not look at Basholme. He dared not look at Detrich. He could barely stand the sight of his own hands before him. To speak of leadership, of standing before the others – to speak of trust, when all this time, within his traitor heart…</p><p>“Well,” Basholme said after a moment of silence – with deep weariness, but without anger, without contempt, without anything more than the sound of his own hand dragged down rasping over his beard. “There is an opportunity there, if he recovers. Tell him. He’ll have you.”</p><p>The pieces of Ander’s shattered world pitched into a wild whirlwind.</p><p>He glanced up as much as he dared, met the other man’s tired, honest eyes. “What?”</p><p>“It’ll do him good. Justice is a great master, but he doesn’t hold a man at night – “ he scowled at Ander’s look. “What’s the matter with you?”</p><p>“He – “ <em>have me? Have </em>me? “He is not – he has a wife.”</p><p>“Had, I said. That’s long in the past – and it’s not been easy, let me tell you, seeing him alone all this time. He’s not made for it, you might notice.”</p><p><em>More than I should</em>. “He does not, surely – “</p><p>“What – oh! With men? He very surely does.”</p><p>“He <em>cannot</em>!”</p><p>“Cannot! Would you like to tell him he <em>cannot</em> do anything?” Basholme reared in his seat again, now directly in Ander’s face. “I’ve known him five times as long as you have. He’s loved men. He’d love you. Whatever damned wretched creature you are in your own mind, <em>he</em> sees you true – he trusts you with his revolution, and he’d trust you with his heart.”</p><p>It was the dead of night, Ander thought abruptly, a sudden madness of a thought. They were speaking much too loudly. Someone would have heard. <em>He’ll have you</em>. <em>I can’t live without him. In love</em>.</p><p>It was impossible. That Detrich may not mind what he was, that, he could fathom – Detrich who called every man brother who fought for his cause, who welcomed women into his army, who had never as much as blinked at the mention of those whispers hounding Ander’s reputation. That Basholme was happy to follow his friend in this, that could be. Even the others, perhaps, even folk like Hedi, common people fighting for Detrich’s cause, for a world made right and just. But that Detrich should <em>himself – </em>that he should want – that he should be<em> – I may be wretched, but him? </em>Impossible.</p><p>He looked to the bed. Detrich had not stirred, but he was still breathing. Alive, alive, alive. <em>If!</em></p><p>“You must ride tonight,” Basholme said again, after no more than two heartbeats of mercy. “He trusts you. Be worthy of it.”</p><p>Perhaps he had had some wrong ideas about what made wretchedness. Ander closed his eyes. “Give me tonight. I will ride at dawn.”</p><p>It cost Basholme to relent, he saw; but relent he did, tearing himself from his seat at Detrich’s side as though the tear was bodily. <em>He loves him, too, after another fashion. </em>Perhaps that was why Basholme had understood, ultimately. Perhaps any love was natural, that had Detrich as its subject.</p><p>He left the room and shut the door behind him, and then Ander was alone, with the man who might have him – if he lived.</p><p>His mind was still whirling, reeling and unmoored, his thoughts coming like waves to brush the feet of the idea – <em>love, you’ve fallen in love, he’s loved men </em>– only to retreat, scattering like so much foam. But his hands knew what to do. Detrich’s breathing seemed more strained now, as it often did with nightfall, and shivers were starting through his spine. Ander soaked then squeezed out the rag, touched it with infinite care to his temple. Listened for his exhale, watched his shuddering muscles still.</p><p>A miracle it was not. But he continued running the cloth over Detrich’s face, over his eyes, his cheeks, his throat. Thinking of all those times – how shameful, how incredible to recall them now – when he had touched the man’s face before, wiping it clean, and imagining that he could wipe away the lines of frowning stress or pain or anger. How long had he known the truth in those touches, the joy he had found in them – not only of his body, but of his heart and soul?</p><p><em>I love you.</em> He thought the words in their entirety. The fathomless fullness of them. <em>I know they say men like myself have no capacity for it.</em> His fingers slipped beneath the folds of the rag, skin brushing against the heat of Detrich’s skin. <em>But I love you. </em>If there was wretchedness, it was to name the feeling anything else.</p><p>Detrich did not wake, did not move, could not hear the racing of his heart or his thoughts. All light might be snuffed out of the world. But what a grand thing it had been, to be the man that Detrich trusted. To look at himself, and think not <em>wretched</em>, but <em>worthy of his trust</em>.</p><p>He lingered, his fingers at the corner of Detrich’s mouth, feeling Detrich’s breath against his palm – the battle that was every breath, filling in the delicate bones of his hand, shooting up into his arm, his chest, his gut. He lay his other arm on the bed, lay down his head upon it, shut his eyes and heard nothing but that breath. <em>I love you. I love you. So I will live, and I will go.</em></p><p>The first light of dawn came, as it would have one way or another. Ander had not quite slept, and not quite been in the world. No one else had as much as touched the door. It had been the two of them all night, and now night was ending.</p><p>He raised his head slowly, braced on the bed to raise himself up. Putting the steel back into his spine vertebra by vertebra with his gaze on Detrich’s face. He would ride, and the revolution –</p><p>Detrich’s eyes were fluttering open. Blue and clear.</p><p>Ander froze. His heart swelled like a fire in a gale.</p><p>He put the back of a hand to Detrich’s face – the sweat was cooling, the fever broken. Detrich pulled in a deep breath, winced as it tugged on his wound, and blinked up. Disarmed, confused, weak as an ember. But alive, alive, <em>alive</em>.</p><p>“Ander,” he mumbled, then in a voice almost his own, “Were you here all night…?”</p><p>If he had not steeled himself, Ander would not have been able to speak. “Four nights. You had a terrible fever.” He swallowed painfully hard as Detrich seemed to digest that. “We thought you might die.”</p><p>Detrich blinked again. “I… what?” <em>Die </em>seemed a foreign word to him. He passed a hand over his chest, probing along the injury, then stirred into sudden, affronted alarm. “<em>Four days?</em>”</p><p>And there he was – trying to push up in bed, grabbing unsteadily for Ander’s wrist, demanding to know all that happened and how was the village and who was in command at camp and <em>my revolution</em> and <em>a small thing. </em>Hedi and Basholme had their task cut out for them, Ander thought as he gave himself, like a man quenching an unbearable thirst, to answering Detrich’s urging questions even as he implored him not to move. Even as he watched the alarm fade, and fierce, focused fury spark to life again in Detrich’s eyes.</p><p>Detrich wearied quickly, but would not do so for long: any caretaker would be frustrated with him within the day, never mind weeks of recovering his full strength. Basholme may well regret sending Ander from his side. But for himself, Ander would ride – to camp, to the revolution. To hold up cause and trust, until Detrich returned.</p><p>“Yes – you have to go,” Detrich said instantly when he told him as much. He was beginning to fade again, if a much gentler fading, into a calm and healing sleep. His hand was still tight about Ander’s wrist, as though to belay his words. “I’ll be well – faster than they think. But it’s you they need now. We have great things to do. You and I…” His eyelids too heavy, he mumbled, “Saved me again. All those years… where have you been…”</p><p>Ander glanced down to where their hands were almost linked – Detrich’s fingers about his wrist, just slipping free. <em>Tell him. He’d have you</em>.</p><p>But they were in the midst of bloody revolution, and he needed to ride. All was not yet right. And he needed to be immovable.</p><p>Fifty years he had been immovable. He knew how to live in that way. He did not know how to live with the <em>if</em>.</p><p>“Sleep,” he told Detrich softly; and if he touched the sleeping man’s face one final time before leaving, surely that was no betrayal.</p>
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<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Chapter 5</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Brief note: this chapter introduces a fantasy element (the soul web and Land's Own Guardian) which may seem a bit out of the left field if you're not familiar with the Guardiansverse. It's not very important to the story: all you need to know is that the Land's Own Guardian is a traditionally symbolic role.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“When have you last slept?”</p><p>The air was balmy: a soft and spring-gilded evening in the capitol, welcomed by all who had recently fought in bitter struggle over its fate, Royalist and Revolutionary alike. Ander eased the door to the office carefully shut behind him, conscious of how much any noise might disturb the man inside. The man spending that very spring night – and at least two of the nights before it – at a great oak desk, murmuring over sheet after sheet of paper. Labouring to find words to speak to a world remade.</p><p>Festus Detrich, Land’s Own Guardian.</p><p>What a moment that had been. The revolution at its apex. The Kaiser’s balance burning, the city suffused in the smoke of the old order and the gunpowder of the new – and the web, the great weave of all the souls of the nation, had shifted itself to coalesce around Detrich as its linchpin. None of them had predicted it: even Ander, just old enough to remember the last such transformation, had been caught unaware. No one knew what made a Land’s Own, precisely. Only that it was the nature of the web, the nation, to come together and pour its power into one who embodied its will and want.</p><p>That was the power Detrich held now: it was not the power he had wanted. There was no Land’s Own of the common people alone. The web bound all souls together, lowborn and high. Its centre stood for and served them all.</p><p>And so the Kaiser lived. The aristocracy held on, though much diminished. A tangled compromise, not a clean victory – for Detrich least of all. But Ander was old enough to be unsurprised, and world-weary enough to see glory in the old order forced to compromise.</p><p>He took a moment to appreciate the sight: the office, the desk, the view of the Parliament courtyard from the window. Detrich taking a rightful place at last. The backwater peasant’s son, the student too destitute to graduate, the brilliant officer snubbed by his fellows – here at the heart of power, buoyed by and carrying the hopes of his people. In his window, a new parliament for a land made new, where any man of any station could vote and stand. The parliament that Detrich would address for the first time the very next morning.</p><p>If he could still see straight by then, at least.</p><p>Detrich did not look up from his desk. He was toying with, really twitching his pen between thumb and forefinger, tapping its tip against the paper in an uneven staccato. “Lock the door, will you?”</p><p>It was not the answer Ander had been hoping for, though probably what he should have known he would get. He obeyed, though not without allowing the shutting of that door to sound. A heavy note in the silence of the office.</p><p>“By my count,” he said after a moment, “it has been sixty hours.”</p><p>That, at last, got him a glance. A surprised one, at that, Detrich hesitating over an arithmetic his brain was not quite the equal of just at the moment. The blue of his eyes was a muted sheen in a spider’s web of red, and all within sunken pits. A tremor remained in his fingers even when the twitching pen stilled. “No… it can’t have been. Didn’t I… what was I doing last night?”</p><p>“This.”</p><p>“Really?”</p><p>“I had breakfast brought to you here. I am told you did very little about it.”</p><p>“I drank the coffee.” Even he seemed to realize this was not the best deflection. A sigh, and Detrich dropped his pen and buried the heel of his hand in the orbit of one eye. A corner of his mouth tugged wryly upward. “I suppose I’d better finish this before the hallucinations start.”                             </p><p>Ander came to the side of the desk to look critically down at the paper: no more than a handful of sentences, in a jumbled almost parody of an impeccably neat hand. Detrich was a rhetorician of the moment, and a brilliant one. If he had ever written down a public address before, Ander had not seen it. “I fear I do not fancy your chances.”</p><p>“Your support is noted, you arse.”</p><p>“I have come to offer an alternative approach.”</p><p>“Of course you have,” Detrich muttered. His voice held the eeriest note: trying for resentment, but clearly finding that he hadn’t it in him.</p><p>He was visibly steeling himself when he looked back up to Ander. “You know what the damned stakes are tomorrow. I cannot misstep. They’ll say the Land’s Own is a ceremonial role, apolitical, beholden to the crown – they have my predecessors for a hundred years to hang that on. Apolitical! Is this what I’m to offer the people, after a year of bloodshed?”</p><p>The idea seemed to cause him more anguish than any blow or wound Ander had ever seen him take. In lieu of putting his hand on Detrich’s shoulder, he put it on the desk by the paper. “And do you suppose another sleepless night would improve your performance?”</p><p>“What else can I do? What else do I have to give?”</p><p>His voice was raw, after the fashion of an open cut: stripped of that depth of certainty, like a serene thunder, that had hypnotized Ander when the whip had failed to silence him, a year and a lifetime ago. He stared into the air as though the question hung there physically to taunt him.</p><p><em>He is a man</em>, Ander thought: thought it as he never had before.</p><p>He dropped to kneel by Detrich’s chair. Placed his hand on Detrich’s knee, close to where Detrich’s own hands now lay, hauntingly limp, in his lap.</p><p>There ought to have been no strangeness in it: he had carried the full knowledge of his own feelings for many months now, had tucked it fully into its well-furnished chest within him, to now and then gaze into as though into a hoard of gold before shutting the lid again. He should not have lingered on it any more than he hesitated, now, to think of all the times he had touched Detrich in comfort – from that baffling shave, three days after their meeting, to wiping away the sweat of the fever that had nearly killed him. And yet it differed; it differed. He had seen Detrich in pain too many times, but every time beneath the pain there had been rage and energy. There had been purpose. No pain borne by that much-tried body had ever touched the will that moved it. This – this now was something else.</p><p>He had seen Detrich’s body falter: never his conviction. And whether the comfort would be welcome, whether it would even be possible…</p><p>“When I began this,” Detrich said softly – his head bowed, not quite looking at Ander’s hand. His own fingers twisted in each other. “My revolution. I knew… I studied law, you know, but I read histories. More histories than I can count. I knew. It’s never clean. It’s never really over. Uprisings, rebellions, wars… never really finished. But I thought – I was young – I was <em>angry</em>. I thought I might…”</p><p>“Make all things right,” Ander whispered, his heart half stopping the voice in his throat.</p><p>Detrich’s gaze shot up abruptly, met his own. Utterly disarmed, and achingly beautiful in it.</p><p>It was all Ander could do not to take his hand. He spoke on, hoarse, “Whatever happens tomorrow, you cannot count this a failure. Imperfect, unfinished, very well – we are all imperfect. Unfinished. But the country is not what it was. Your people are none of us are what we were. You have changed us. And we are making right every day.”</p><p>“My people…” Detrich murmured, put one restless hand to his chest. “You speak of them, but I see them. Their souls. Light like you cannot imagine. And me… I come from dirt.”</p><p>“It has never stopped you. Would it stop you now?”</p><p>“Certainly not. But a man gets tired, fighting. Fighting for everything. Always…” he was sinking slowly forward in the chair, the steel leaving his back, until though Ander was kneeling Detrich had to look up to him. “I’m so <em>tired</em>, Ander.”</p><p>It was all Ander could do not to take his hand; and then none of that was enough, and Ander did.</p><p>“I know you,” he said, finding a strange fire in his words. Fire and a calm certainty, both new and familiar. “I know you, Festus, I trust you. I have never doubted you, and I do not doubt you now. Whatever you think of yourself, I see you whole. I see you. I love you – “</p><p>He was a man of control: he had never in his life, his fifty years of life gone like so much chaff, said words he had not meant to say. Never before now. They leapt from his lips on their own wings, and Ander’s heart plummeted, a frozen stone, the dark opening before him –</p><p>Detrich’s eyes opened wide, an engulfing ocean of blue – and then he surged up, up and forward to twine his hands in Ander’s hair and take Ander’s mouth with his own.</p><p>In all those fifty years, Ander’s body had never moved without his command: it did so now, half permitted, half abandoned. Floating, flowing like water, cresting with the near-incomprehensible inside his chest, as he and Detrich – unparted, forgetting breath – rose in tandem from floor and seat. They stood only to pull each other closer. Ander gave it all freedom – his hands, to run into the heavy silk of Detrich’s hair, to tangle in strands loose from Detrich’s long plait, touch the shivering place at the base of his skull. His arms, his legs, to shift and press against Detrich’s own. To feel every inch he could of that tall and magnificent body, trim, muscled, hard, and longed for, <em>oh</em> – their chests brushed against each other’s, their brows, and the heat between them turned the air to molten gold, to forge-fire. <em>I will burn, I will burst, I will come undone – </em>and Detrich would take it all in, he knew.</p><p>They came up for air. Detrich – Festus was laughing, with his mouth and his eyes, giddy and radiant and his hands still on Ander’s shoulders. Ander felt his breath stutter, wondered if his knees would hold. And then he was laughing also, with the joy of a man half his own age.</p><p>“I’m delirious,” Festus murmured after a moment, his head dropping so his brow again met Ander’s own. “I have no other excuse. I should have asked your leave.”</p><p>“I’m glad you did not.” The words came stunningly easy. How easy, all of a sudden, to speak his heart. “I feel… young.”</p><p>“And foolish?”</p><p>“Having freedom to be foolish is a glorious thing.”</p><p>“Here’s to that. No revolution was ever built on caution or wisdom…” he drew back just a touch to look up at Ander with such open adoration that Ander’s knees threatened surrender again. “You deserve every freedom. Everything I can give, and more.”</p><p>All the freedom Ander wanted was to kiss him. Kiss his mouth, his eyes, his throat, the glimpse of tantalizing copper under his open collar. To move with him, step by awkward, delighted step, toward the couch by the far wall of the office – made for gentle-born guests, it would have to endure another purpose. Festus made a faint pleased sound in his throat that told Ander he approved.</p><p>He dropped to lean back against the cushions, closing his eyes, as Ander knelt before him. Though then he scowled, sighing. “My damned speech won’t write itself…”</p><p>Ander pressed one palm, calloused from sword and pen, to his lips. “I guarantee no further work would do it better than a good night’s sleep.”</p><p>“I can’t – it’s not <em>sleep</em> I was hoping you had in mind now.” Festus opened one eye, a shimmer in its dark blue that sent a current through every muscle low in Ander’s stomach. “But I have work to do. Being absurdly in love with you changes much, but not that.”</p><p><em>Absurdly</em>. Ander took that word in, not with the self-recrimination he had expected, but with another leap of that youthful joy that seemed to make spring bloom in his blood. Let it be so, then; let it be in all its strangeness, if it were love, and it were his.</p><p>Softly, he said, “Do you trust me?”</p><p>Festus stared at him, almost affronted at the question. Ander raised their joined hands again, murmured against them, “Then trust my faith in you, and rest.”</p><p>He waited, waited – waiting was not painful now – and it came: the tension flowing out of Festus’s body, inch by inch and breath by breath. Still slow, and yet some undercurrent gone from it, some furtiveness. As though for once there was no danger in comfort; no great mystery, that it should be possible.</p><p>Festus’s eyes drifted shut again. He muttered, “I don’t know if I can sleep.”</p><p>“I have that matter in hand.”</p><p>“Oh, <em>do</em> you.”</p><p>Ander gave him one stroke of the thigh by way of warning before undoing his belt. Festus let loose a breath of laughter. “A man of his word.”</p><p>He gasped faintly when Ander freed his cock, a gasp Ander knew well – one that said <em>too long</em>. No need to hurry now, no call for anything but gentleness, Ander ran his fingers along the velvet skin, from base to crown. Let it linger, the feeling of every shiver and twitch through his hand, through Festus’s groin and running visibly up his spine. No need to fear invasion, prying eyes, wagging tongues, no need to think of tomorrow at all. Not only time, but freedom to explore every little marvel: the weight of Festus’s cock half-hard and stirring in his hand, the firm muscle of his inner thigh, the fine flush of brown skin against the thatch of dark hair. The heady smell of him, all there, all open to be touched and caressed and desired. The sound of his breathing, deep and deeper. The start of a moan slipping free…</p><p>He was surprised when Festus shifted one hand to place it over his own – not to urge, but to slow. To cherish. “Do you know how long I’d wanted this?”</p><p>Ander’s heart fluttered, a shivering answer in his own loins. “How long?”</p><p>“Since we first touched – you remember, when you gave me that shave? From the moment you touched my face.”</p><p>“You said nothing.”</p><p>“No – the revolution had to be first. For one of my commanders to be my lover…” he opened his eyes, just a hint, to meet Ander’s. Dark with desire, but sharp with intent. Ander was veteran enough to understand, and feel no resentment; and yet Festus spoke on, hesitant, “And you… I saw how you held yourself. Knew how you’d protected yourself, that you must have done it all your life. I feared… breaking you open.”</p><p><em>Breaking me open</em>. Ander breathed in, and remembered – all the times he had touched Festus before, in hesitation, in reverence, in sure knowledge of futility. And yet never able to truly hold himself back.</p><p>“I think you were right,” he whispered, and then found that he was smiling. “But you did, nonetheless. Break something open in me. That same night… you asked, where had I been all these years?”</p><p>To his astonishment, Festus flushed and dropped his eyes. The sight took his breath away.</p><p>“I… shouldn’t have.” There was something like shyness there in his voice, as when he had held the book in the graf’s castle, spoke of the private joy of reading histories late into the night. “The revolution is one thing, I don’t know what would have become of it without you. But my own wants…”</p><p>He trailed off. Ander spread out his palm, brushed it slowly up Festus’s body. “You think yourself unworthy?”</p><p>“Unworthy? No. But I suppose I’m not used to…” Hesitation, still. As though the thought of his own wants, voiced and answered, was too much to be released in words. “You’ve saved me half a hundred times. How much can a man ask for?”</p><p>He looked almost astonished at Ander’s smile, as Ander rose up to touch his face, to kiss him once more. <em>Is anything beyond asking, when I can have this?</em> “It was you who saved me,” Ander whispered against his lips. “Every time, from the very beginning. All my life, I have felt the hands of strangers about my heart – countless strangers, squeezing. Every stir, every hope and desire… strangling all emotion out of me. And they are all gone.” He cupped Festus’s face, an echo of that tenderness within. “There is your hand only.”</p><p>Festus’s eyes misted over. He said nothing, seemed half as if he could not, and that was the sweetest of answers – this man who would speak change to the nation, speechless at his touch.</p><p>Ander kissed him again, and again, and drew slowly back down Festus’s body – his face, his chest, every touch an echo of past longing. And at last, he could slip his hand between Festus’s thighs, shiver along with him in a stab of pleasure. And say, “There can be change for you, also. Let me give you comfort. Give you this.”</p><p>He took Festus in hand, fingers light and warm about the shaft, and Festus sat back and shut his eyes and gave him what he gave no one and nothing else in the world: surrender.</p><p>Ander worked him slowly, his own heartbeat fluttering, dancing in his veins to the tune of Festus’s breath. Deepening at first, as the pleasure poured through muscles and a mind pushed too often to their brink. A wildfire soul coming anchored in a gentle touch. Then a sharp intake, an open-mouthed hitch as Ander’s thumb rolled over the tip. Festus shifted his hips, a hint of a thrust. A needy whisper of sound. <em>Impatient as ever</em>. Ander smiled to himself, and obeyed with a harder squeeze that made Festus’s mouth fall open on a silent <em>Ah</em>.</p><p>They found the rhythm between them. Slow. Firm. Ander tightening his grip in waves that each ran trembling up Festus’s spine. Until Festus’s breath was pulling deeper again, each inhale shivering and full-bodied, engulfed in sensation. His head fell back, mouth open, and the air rushed out of him in time with his spend in one great sigh of astounded contentment.</p><p>The sofa may prove a more serious issue than he had supposed, Ander thought, so dazed with bliss he feared coming to his feet lest he begin to float. This may be cause for some dismay when Festus was awake enough to recognize the situation: certainly, he would have some grievances on behalf of the cleaning staff. But that was a problem for tomorrow.</p><p>Tomorrow, Festus would stand in Parliament. Tomorrow, they would have to untangle it, what shape their love could have in an unfinished country, where a Land’s Own Guardian could still be condemned as a peasant and a triumphant general as a pervert. There was fighting to be done. The fighting did not end.</p><p>But tonight, under his hand, Festus was sleeping sated and serene. Tonight, all was right in the world.</p>
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<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Chapter 6</h2></a>
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    <p>He had had the sweetest dream. Ander blinked awake, hearing the wind outside his door. Just shy of one in the morning, and a gale outside roaring with rain. The sound of a gate opening and closing had woken him through it all. He rose from the bed and padded over to the hearth to poke the fire alive. He knew what was coming.</p><p>A handful of moments, and sure enough, there it was: the sounds of the front door being opened then shut, the thump of heavy boots shaking icy mud off. A sniffle and a heavy cough. A murmured curse of singular exasperation with the inadequacies of mortal humanity.</p><p>Faintly smiling, Ander made for the entrance hall.</p><p>Festus was lingering at the doorway, evidently at an impasse with his heavy greatcoat. Soaking wet, from the soles of his boots – worn too thin since midsummer – to the tip of the nose he had buried in a handkerchief that had clearly seen just as trying a day as its owner.</p><p>The indignant look he tried to give Ander’s smile was forestalled by a miserable sneeze. Ander made a sound between a chuckle and a tut.</p><p>“I seem to recall saying, just this morning – “</p><p>“I still don’t have time for a damned sniffle.”</p><p>“Pity that your nose was not consulted on your schedule.” He came forward to take hold of the coat so that Festus could at last shrug it off, knelt to help his lover undo his boots. “Has Hedi looked you over?”</p><p>Festus groaned. “Tea and bedrest, she said. Bedrest!”</p><p>“Appalling,” Ander said with a sealed face. Festus attempted another glare, and was curtailed by another sneeze. “Tea, however, I think we may permit.”</p><p>There came waiting, of course. Drawn-out seconds of waiting, as Festus wrested with the moment. Duty, obligation, restless anger, resentment at the limitations of his own flesh and blood. His shivering, the wet rasp in his breath, the frown of a pressing headache – and trust, and faith, and the beautiful hint of <em>want</em> across his features as he looked up at Ander. And Ander waited, and watched, and relished the waiting – for the unequalled sweetness of the moment when at last Festus relented. To that want; to the warmth inside; to his care.</p><p>He went over to the kitchen, leaving Festus to wander into the bedroom in search of dry clothes and the preservation of some dignity. In another life he would have summoned a servant: in this, there was a singular pleasure in brewing his lover’s drink with his own hands. Cheap tea simmered strong, a squeeze of lemon, a spoonful of wildflower honey. A slice of rye bread besides slathered with the same syrupy gold. Simple things. Freiherr Kirschen of Estgardt would hardly have known them. He put them on a tray to bring to his lover, the peasant and mutineer, and felt as honoured as ever he had in his life.</p><p>He found Festus in bed, dressed in a reasonably dry linen shirt and sniffling into a reasonably dry handkerchief, though also squinting at a handful of official-looking papers. Little to say to that; Ander knew the limits of the miracles even he could work on the man. He was content with the way his lover’s weary eyes lit up at the sight of his offering, and of him.</p><p>He settled on the bed, still holding the tray, smiled faintly to see Festus pick up the mug and lower his face for a deep breath of the steam. “How are you feeling?”</p><p>“It’s a small thing,” Festus said, and promptly began to cough and could not stop until he’d had a drink of the tea. He blew his nose with a long unhappy sound. “But terrible, if you must know.”</p><p>Ander reached to sweep back a strand of hair from his face. “You look the part, I fear.”</p><p>“If you mean to imply I’m not fit to be seen in Parliament – “</p><p>“I will say it outright tomorrow morning.”</p><p>“Sun’s sake.” Festus shuddered with equal parts chill and dismay, sniffed disconsolately, and managed a passable glare at the papers. “None of this will keep…”</p><p>Ander touched his hair again, carefully sliding his fingers through the unravelling plait. He tugged it loose of its binding ribbon, then brushed a thumb along the curve of Festus’s jaw. Watched his lover’s eyes drift helplessly shut. Shifted the tray aside, then shifted his legs up to join Festus on the bed, their bodies pressed close, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip.</p><p>Festus exhaled slowly at the touch of gentle fingers across his scalp: a sigh, a grumble, an escaping sound of relief. Hoarseness and congestion dragged the deep bass of his voice half an octave lower, husky and shivering through Ander’s skin. “You’re going to catch this cold.”</p><p>“A likely scenario.”</p><p>“And who’ll take care of you then, eh? Me?”</p><p>“So I expect.”</p><p>“And state affairs be damned?”</p><p>Ander said nothing, only raised an eyebrow when Festus cracked one eye open. Watched his lover begin to bristle – and then to laugh.</p><p>A brief sound. Fleeting. But it took the last of the stubborn fight out of him, left only the man who leaned his head against Ander’s shoulder, sighing as Ander’s fingers slid through his undone hair. Still faintly chilled, his breathing thick, his skin a touch too hot where Ander touched his face – but all things that could be eased and cared for. No battle now, no bloody urgency and a cold dawn lurking. Only the two of them.</p><p>In a handful of days Festus would burn bright as ever again; but how grand, how precious to hold him now. To tend to him. Like fire in the hearth.</p><p>Pressed warmly against him, Festus seemed to have abandoned all intent to move. Ander prodded him gently into finishing the bread and tea, gratified to hear his voice regain some resonance as the hot drink worked to clear his throat and head, and to see him perk up at the taste of honey. At last he put aside the tray and drew the covers over both of them. Festus wasted no time in pulling close again, as close as he could come.</p><p>“I should appreciate if you avoid sneezing on me.”</p><p>“Do I look in any state to make you promises?”</p><p>“I choose to trust,” Ander answered dryly, and was rewarded with another faint ring of his lover’s laughter.</p><p>“You do, don’t you,” he murmured as Ander reached for the <em>Epos</em> on the bedside table, thumbed it open at the bookmark. “You do.”</p><p>His heart as bright as a hearth in winter, Ander began to read aloud.</p>
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